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Monday, September 18, 2017

Spreading the Foodie Love

Excerpts from the NY Times -

What Happens When Marcus Samuelsson Takes Harlem to London?
By NIKITA STEWART

Marcus Samuelsson lives in Harlem. He loves Harlem. He loves it so much that he decided to spread it to east London.

Mr. Samuelsson’s Red Rooster Harlem, a neighborhood restaurant known for its soul food and soul-stirring gospel brunches, has birthed a doppelgänger Red Rooster Shoreditch.

~~~~~~~~~~

Since adopting Harlem as his home and choosing it to hone his skills as a showman restaurateur, Mr. Samuelsson has masterfully straddled a fine line between gentrification, appropriation and approbation. Mr. Samuelsson, born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden, has garnered enough Harlem street cred to successfully strut out Streetbird Rotisserie, a more casual, less expensive eatery less than mile from Red Rooster Harlem, and Harlem Eat Up, an annual food festival that takes over Morningside Park each May. He has found a culinary aesthetic that’s the equivalent of the electric slide, a line dance that still prompts black families to rise up in unison at backyard cookouts but equally rouses a crowd at a predominantly white wedding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/travel/red-rooster-london-shoreditch-marcus-samuelsson.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0


Apple Music — Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives Trailer — Apple

A Bad Dude

An excerpt from the Washington Post -

‘The first white president’ is a ‘bad dude’
By Jonathan Capehart

I have a confession to make. I have not been as enamored of Ta-Nehisi Coates and his writing on race as some white people, particularly liberals, are. In fact, recently, I’ve discovered that I’m not alone in thinking that Coates’s views on race are too emotional, too dark, too relentlessly pessimistic. As one friend wrote in an email, “I tend not to agree with Coates because the premise of everything he writes is all white people in this country are evil and just look at the history of America to prove it. I tend to be a lot less cynical than that.”

When it comes to race and the United States, I am Martin Luther King Jr. to Coates’s Malcolm X. But ever since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the ensuing grim roll call of black lives felled by law enforcement and wannabe cops and others who simply felt empowered, my views on race and our nation have moved steadily closer to Coates’s. With “The First White President,” Coates’s epic examination of and explanation for President Trump’s victory last November in the Atlantic magazine, there no longer is any daylight between me and the provocative chronicler of America’s racial divide.

In paragraph after paragraph, Coates articulates what has roiled my heart and mind since election night. He lays out with precision and data what I knew in my bones. White people, generally speaking, were not and are not going to slip into their impending status as “the new minority” without a fight — a fight successfully waged by a man who ran the most racist, xenophobic, misogynistic campaign for president in memory. And that was after spending years questioning the legitimacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, by peddling the racist birther lie that the nation’s first African American president wasn’t born in the United States.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/09/18/the-first-white-president-is-a-bad-dude/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.077fef3511cc

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/?utm_source=nl-atlantic-daily-091217&silverid=MzEwMTkwMTQ4ODk4S0

Report Confirms What We Already Know

From the Huffington Post -

Exclusive: New Report Offers Proof Of US Hate Crime Rise In The Trump Era
New data obtained by HuffPost shows hate crimes rose nationally in 2016. The numbers for 2017 aren’t looking great either.
By Christopher Mathias

The number of hate crimes rose across the United States in 2016, marking the first time in over a decade that the country has experienced consecutive annual increases in crimes targeting people based on their race, religion, sexuality, disability or national origin.

Data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, and provided exclusively to HuffPost, shows hate crimes rose about 5 percent from 2015 to 2016.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hate-crime-rise-2016-united-states-trump_us_59becac8e4b086432b07fed8?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

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Resting in Peace and Beauty

From Atlas Obscura -

In Search of Cemeteries Alive With Beauty, Art, and History
These resting places celebrate life.
BY ANIKA BURGESS

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cemeteries-to-visit-before-you-die-monuments

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Redeemed

An excerpt from the NY Times Race/Related by Eli Hager -

Michelle Jones was released in August after two decades in prison.
Now a Ph.D. candidate at N.Y.U., Ms. Jones is being heralded
as an extraordinary self-made scholar of history.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
In April, I received an email from a source: a teacher at a women’s prison in Indiana. In it, she wrote almost in passing that one of her students — who had been incarcerated for more than two decades for the murder of her 4-year-old son — was now getting out, and had already been “accepted at N.Y.U., Harvard and a host of other top grad schools...”

You don’t hear that every day, I thought.

And that was before I knew that Harvard’s top brass, including its president and provost, had taken the highly unusual step of overruling their history department’s selection of this extraordinary student, Michelle Jones, citing her crime.

To Ms. Jones’s many supporters, her story is about her profound accomplishments and her joyful personality. Their goal was in part to convey to the world all she had achieved while in prison — conducting original archival research without the internet, publishing widely, presenting her groundbreaking findings by video-chat to historians’ conferences, and winning the loyal support of the top academics in her field, all without knowing it would lead to any concrete reward.

https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/2017/09/14/race-related?nlid=38867499

The Facts Are Self-Evident.

An excerpt from Salon -

Stop acting surprised, America: Donald Trump is a white supremacist
Trump has made clear to America for decades where he stands on race. It's long past time to accept the facts
By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

The facts are self-evident. Donald Trump is a white supremacist. The Republican Party — despite its duplicitous and hypocritical claims to the contrary — is the country’s largest white supremacist and white identity organization. Together, Donald Trump and the Republicans are waging a war against black and brown people’s liberty and freedom with the goal of overturning the modest gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Republican voters are, generally speaking, supportive of this racist crusade.

Yet many Americans somehow continue to react with shock, surprise or amazement, and claim to be baffled by Donald Trump’s slavish devotion to white supremacy. In reality, this is one of the few areas of Trump’s public and private life where he has shown a remarkable amount of dedication, consistency and discipline.

http://www.salon.com/2017/09/17/stop-acting-surprised-america-donald-trump-is-a-white-supremacist/?source=newsletter


Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

From the Root -

Twitter Drags Kevin Hart After He Admits to Cheating on His Pregnant Wife. And Hilarity Ensues
By Angela Helm

Kevin Hart’s messy love life is moving into hoarder’s territory.

Not only did his first wife, Torrei Hart, recently accuse him of cheating on her with his current wife and “rib” Eniko Parish, but on Saturday, the 38-year-old comedian had to backtrack on his vehement denials of cheating on a pregnant Eniko after his side slide apparently threatened to extort him for an undisclosed amount of money.

http://thegrapevine.theroot.com/twitter-drags-kevin-hart-after-he-admits-to-cheating-on-1818488422?utm_source=theroot_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-09-17


Transporting Your Kitty

From Lifehacker -

Get Your Cat in Their Carrier by Wrapping Them Into a "Kitty Burrito"
By Jaime Green

Your cat knows what’s up. Even if she doesn’t run and hide at the sight of her carrier, there’s no way she’s going into that thing without a fight. But the fight stresses her out and can leave you frustrated and scratched up—not to mention late for the vet. Enter the kitty burrito.

Basically, you need to restrain your cat’s limbs, both to protect yourself from claws and to stop her from grabbing hold of the outside of the carrier. (How is such a small animal so strong??) Being wrapped up can also help soothe your cat, like swaddling a baby or putting an anxious dog into a Thundershirt.

(See step-by-step directions in the link below).

https://lifehacker.com/get-your-cat-in-their-carrier-by-wrapping-them-into-a-1818487720?utm_source=theroot_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-09-17

Things iPhone Helped Destroy

From the NY Times -

How an underground script list changed movies

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Just Suspended?

An excerpt from the Huffington Post -

Firefighter Says Saving One Dog Is ‘More Important’ Than A Million Black People
Tyler Roysdon has been suspended for his racist Facebook post.
By David Moye

An Ohio fire department has suspended one of its volunteer firefighters for a racist Facebook post suggesting he’d prefer to save a dog in an emergency than a black person.

Tyler Roysdon, a volunteer for Franklin Township, wrote that if he had to choose between saving a dog or a black man from a burning building, the dog would get priority, because “one dog is more important than a million n****rs.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tyler-roysdon-firefighter-racist-facebook_us_59bc2a97e4b0edff971c0fbc